Stories and thoughts on creating, evolving, and offering a great total customer experience

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What is Total CX?

Nothing is more fun than swapping horror stories about bad (or good, or weird) customer experiences you’ve had. And TotalCX is a place where you can do just that. However, it isn’t just a place for stories—it’s also a place to figure out how the customer experience should have been…what exactly went wrong…how to best improve it…and what lessons can we learn from it.

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Customer-centric organizations

01/09/2015

It made me laugh. But it also made me sad. Because it is too on-the-nose. It reminded me of an Xfinity commercial that ran throughout the holiday season that also made me sad. In it, the Ghost of Christmas Present takes Ebenezer Scrooge to a home, announcing, “Now remember, Mr. Scrooge, we can see them, but they can’t see us.” In the living room of a lovely suburban home, decorated lushly for Christmas, a family of five is smiling broadly as the Ghost comments, “See how happy they are.”

02/28/2014

We define customers’ moments of truth as the showstoppers that keep customers from getting things done. These are the things that you need to proactively monitor to see how well you’re doing. Andrew Spanyi, a business process consultant and author, refers to these as your customer experience vital signs. Health care professionals monitor your heart rate and your blood pressure for a reason. They’re important indicators of your health. If you know what matters most to your customers, Andrew reasons (and we agree), you can proactively check these.

Andrew Spanyi offers three key vital signs that every company should be checking:

How easy it is to apply or order?

Was the product/service delivered on time?

How quick, accurate, and complete were responses to inquiries and complaints (e.g., first time resolution)?

We’ve discovered some additional moments of truth that matter to customers performing different activities. We’ve codified them into patterns. Here are some articles that may help you find the CX Vital Signs that matter for your business:

The bottom line: if you care about being a customer-centric organization and delivering a great customer experience, identify the customer-critical moments of truth and monitor them proactively to see how well you’re performing on the things that matter most to customers.

01/10/2014

Gift delivery issues plagued last-minute online shoppers this holiday season (and some not-so-last-minute shoppers). As Ronni Marshak explains, the 2013 holiday season created a perfect storm of anomalies that blew apart even the best designed fulfillment and delivery systems.

Design for Screw-Ups. I never cease to be amazed when our business processes and well-designed systems can’t adapt to “sh*t happens.” In my experience as both a customer experience designer and a business and consumer customer, stuff ALWAYS happens. Things ALWAYS go wrong. So, the first lesson to be learned from debacles, like hundreds of thousands of Christmas gifts not arriving in time for Christmas, is this: Why don’t we design for exceptions?? Since exceptions ARE the norm, why do we keep trying to design smooth-flowing processes that rely on everything working within spec? Why don’t we design systems that are based on uncertainty? Why can’t we make our processes more adaptive and empower our people to be more creative and resilient? While it’s true that every company puts in place belt and suspender back-up plans and systems for high-volume periods, it’s also true that we’re still relying largely on straight through processing with exception handling. What if we changed our paradigm and decided that everything is a potential exception? Would we design different systems and processes? I’m sure they would be more loosely-coupled and more resilient than the ones we’re using today.

Design within and across Ecosystems. I’m sure that logistics experts design holistically. They take everything into account: weather, seasonality, advertising and promotions, supply chain logjams, and irrational customer expectations. But how many designers are thinking in terms of customer scenario-based ecosystems and the cumulative impact when Amazon’s ecosystem + Target’s ecosystem + Wal-Mart’s ecosystem + lots of little mom and pop shops selling online are all combined to deliver a single customer scenario: getting the right gifts to the right people on time? If Santa can do it, why can’t we?

Recover Gracefully. Customers are actually quite forgiving, particularly when weather and logistics—things beyond your control—are involved. But you need to make amends proactively, with elegance and grace in order to assuage angry customers. Ronni Marshak offers some good tips in her article—things you can do throughout the year, whenever the unexpected happens. (And it happens a lot!)

01/07/2014

To kick off the New Year, we offer you our best articles from last year. In fact, in order to make it easy for you to read these, we’ve removed the “paywall” for all of them for 30 days. We hope you’ll take a few minutes to sample those you haven’t noticed or had time to read during the last 12 months.

Every week we publish a new article. Each one takes hours of research, thought, and preparation. Which of these articles did anyone read? Of the visitors to the Customers.com website in 2013, the largest number of you landed on, lingered on, and/or downloaded these 5 of the 60 articles we published last year.

09/14/2013

What’s our advice to savvy executives who are trying to grow and nurture a customer-centric organization? Collaborate with your customers through a Customer Co-Design approach.

Although there are many methods out there to support customer co-design, we advocate our tried-and-true methodology, Customer Scenario® Mapping. For over 20 years, we’ve worked with hundreds of clients and their customers to design new products, websites, business models, mobile strategies, and, well, just about anything, by starting with scenarios—what the customer is trying to achieve—and mapping out the steps that the customer would ideally like to take to reach his goal. The methodology encourages customers and company stakeholders to work together on revolutionary, rather than evolutionary, ideas by envisioning the ideal situation, not the next progression of the current process/product/model/etc. And, as we always remind you—design from the customer’s point of view!

We’ve tested this method around the world. It has been used successfully in Brazil (with farmers), in New Zealand (with adult learners and sheep-shearers), in Uganda (with single moms, rural farmers, school children, and rural transformation specialists), in Germany (with pharmaceutical execs), in the UK and Netherlands (with high tech networking professionals and distributors), in China and New York (with global container shipping customers and customs brokers and shippers). We’ve also led co-design sessions using Customer Scenario Mapping in many different industries: financial services, healthcare, insurance, packaged goods, food preparation, hospitality, travel, retail, mining, energy, and others.

05/16/2013

There’s a good interview on YouTube in which Bob Thompson talks about the habits that define the culture of a company. In order to have a customer-centric company, Bob asserts, your executives need to master and practice these five habits. Ronni Marshak summarizes the main points in the interview (and in Bob’s upcoming book, The Five Habits of Customer-Centric Business Leaders), and amplifies many of these points based on our experience working with execs in organizations who are practicing many of these habits.

What are the habits that successful customer-centric executives share? Rob Thompson of CustomerThink has identified 5: Listen, Think, Empower, Create, and Deliver. We agree, and we add our Customers.com perspective on each of these important habits that should become part of every organization’s DNA.

11/02/2012

In this
week’s report, I talk about paying attention to customers’ emotions as
they do business with you. How fortuitous to receive an excellent
example of how one financial provider thought about customers in a
crisis situation and made a strategic decision to take one burden off of
them as they face the storm—literally.

As
a Chase credit card customer, I received the following email on Monday,
10/29/2012 at 7:14 PM, shortly after Hurricane Sandy violent hitting
the Massachusetts shore.

We hope you, your families and your customers are safe. Natural disasters are very stressful and we want to help where we can.

This
week, we are expanding our efforts to help you and all of our customers
in Massachusetts and Rhode Island as you manage through the storm.

We are
waiving the following Chase fees through Wednesday, October 31st for
customers in Massachusetts and Rhode Island. Please know that you'll
have until the end of business on Thursday to make a deposit or a
payment to bring your account current and avoid the fees.

08/17/2012

For years, people (including consultants) have been struggling to come up with good ROI arguments for "soft stuff" like CX.

Years ago, we were teaching one of our first Customer Scenario® Mapping Facilitation courses to a mixed group of our clients. (Before we developed our online training course, we taught facilitation in a face-to-face two and a half day workshop.) One of the sample maps we worked on was for a FIT (that’s “Facilitator in Training” in CSM speak) from Merck Medco. The map was rather complicated—multiple layers deep, with layers for the end-patient, the employer’s HR folks, the RX benefits management company (that’s Medco), the pharmacist, and the health insurance provider.

As always, we spent a bit of time figuring out the customer’s Moments of Truth (MOTs)—the showstoppers that could derail the entire scenario. That’s when the FIT had a brilliant insight. He realized that each customer MOT was actually measurable!

02/03/2012

Patty Seybold poses a question: Can you transform an industry from the outside? That’s what Local Motors has been doing since 2007 with its mission of creating game-changing cars with an unprecedented standard of customer service. And the way the company is doing it is by creating a true customer ecosystem that embodies the six characteristics of a successful ecosystem:

Help customers achieve and/or manage something they care about.

Design for specific target audiences.

Provide a “secret sauce” that transforms customers’ ability to get things done.

Attract partners & suppliers who can contribute to these customers’ success.

Align the entire ecosystem to meet customers’ success metrics.

Embed, co-brand, and be ubiquitous so customers will encounter and use your secret sauce no matter what their starting point is.

There are a number of take-aways for you and your company that Patty presents, but the one that really resonated to me is you can spawn a vibrant ecosystem of partners and suppliers once you have a core and sustainable community of passionate customers who want to create their own designs and to appreciate and learn from others. It’s amazing what a community of passionate customers can do for a business.